Abdellatif LAABI was born in 1942 in Fès in Marocco. While he was teaching French at Rabat’s high school, he was actively contributing to Souffles, a journal founded in 1966 that played a major role in the cultural renewal of literature in Maghreb. His intellectual opposition to the regime led him to prison for eight years. Released in 1980 he went into exile in France five years later. His life experience feeds his work that is as various as poetry, novel, drama and essay. Always at the confluence of cultures, he fights for humanist values through humor and tenderness in his writing. He also translated a large number of contemporary Arab authors, like the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich. Abdellatif Laâbi was awarded by the French Goncourt Prize for Poetry in 2009 as well as the Great Prize for Francophonie from the Académie française 2 years later.